Ready Player One - by Ernest Cline

What a nerdfest! I absolutely adored this book’s throwback to better times. The 1980’s. Ah, what a time for music, movies, cars, tv programs, and of course, video games. The book is actually set in a dystopian 2040-something era where humans have exploited the Earth to its limits. One of the only things I did not like about this story, as I really liked it overall, was the author’s selling point that “we have used all the oil and mined all the coal and now there’s no energy and the sky is a hazy brown.” No. No no no, you won’t mine all the coal in the next 40 years. There are hundreds of years of reserves in this country alone. And it burns pretty damn clean. My old home of Tucson, Arizona is powered by a giant coal plant that has air around it as clear as anywhere else in that valley. It’s even cleaner than Phoenix, which gets some of its power from a nukular (TM George W. Bush) plant. Coal plants are not quite the smoggy, smokey cloud-factories that are portrayed in commercials anytime a liberal media blasts a right-wing politician for his reluctance to crack down on the Earth-raping coal industry. Politics aside, the setup is a bit rough. We are not working our way out of decent civilisation. We are sort of growing up and growing out as a race, riding the waves of science and technology and human understanding. But this takes a hardline approach for outlining the future as a very dystopian, poverty ridden, overpopulated and almost silly universe; like the setting of the movie Idiocracy. No wars, just dumb people getting dumber. Once that is all over, however, the book is extremely enjoyable.

It starts out with 80's references that we are all pretty familiar with, and I was almost a bit disappointed that its references would all be of the popular variety: Highlander, Back to the Future, Sixteen Candles, Def Lepard, Space Invaders, things that pretty much everyone knows. But that is only the beginning, as the book moves along I found myself catching less and less of the references. 80's cartoons, for example; I am only familiar with the majour ones, like Voltron and Transformers. These are sort of treated as the "pop-culture" of cartoons and Cline glides past them and focuses on some pretty obscure shit. Mainly Japanese shows I have never heard of. It was very enjoyable, however, to test the trivial understanding of the 80's and try to see how familiar all the names, shows, characters, and video games (the glorious, 8bit, 2D videgomes) are to me.

Do not misunderstand me, the nostalgia of this book is the primary source of entertainment that I drew from it. But it has general nerd themes I can enjoy. Like the main character enjoying Youtube style videos of cute geeky girls playing their ukuleles. Who has not geeked out to that? And the material related to a futuristic gaming console and its virtual reality setup that is a unique take on tired theory. There is also a shout-out in there to current real life nerds like Wil Wheaton and Cory Doctorow. 

These are enough for me to say it was a book worth my time, but the story itself – again, once you get passed the "we've mined and sucked all the resources out and burned them all, oh no!" bit – is truly fantastic. The antagonistic Sixers and their mega-corporate organisation conducting attacks and putting the users in very real danger was exciting. The glimpse of their world and their processing of employees and indentured servants reeked of the movie THX-1138, a very enjoyable dystopian sci-fi film that also happens to be George Lucas's first film. 

Above all, a love of classic arcade and 8-bit video games, the ones that pre-date my childhood but I still happen to be familiar with, is the very best part of it all. The videogame industry has been in a bit of a tailspin since a time not long after the Wii came out, giving the impression that better graphics are not necessarily what everyone wants…people just want a fun game. And the games of that era were just that. Further clues about the videogame industry’s struggles comes from how the rise of the mobile device has been a huge blow to their profits. People do not need to spend USD 300 to 500 for an entertainment system and another USD 40 to 60 for a game when they can get a little bit of fun here and there on their phone. And what do I play on my phone? Nintendo, SNES, and arcade games; exactly what Ernest Cline is celebrating in this one.

John Dies at the End

Good news everyone! It's a fucking movie now, so you don't even need to read this book!

The first thing I realized about this book is that it is funny. Not like, here is a shitty joke, or that character has a weird tweak, or the idea that monsters and demons are just like bullies, sort of funny. I mean full on f***ing hilarious. If you have a dark sense of humour, think exploding people and goofy spiders with little hands and fake wigs could be funny, combined with the absolutely strange intuitive near-superpowers of demon slaying kids who are basically f***-ups and a guy who loves to deliver cheesy one-liners before he blasts monsters, then yeah, this shit is really great.

I can’t speak too much of the plot, because I think it is actually quite messy and not very good. The fact that it bounces all over the place only to be tied in all together at the end is cool, but nothing unique and leaves for a lot of unanswered questions in terms of how and when things took their turn into the alternate reality or crossed-universe that the narrator, and the reader by the end, are familiar with.

But my goodness, weak, discontinuous or fragmented plot slopped together or not, this book is full of great moments. So much so that I honestly laughed out loud, in real hearty gutlaughs, and it really made me feel like I didn’t care what was happening in the plot at that particular moment; the writing is funny enough to cover the tracks of any literary crimes.

David Wong, the alter-ego of Cracked.com writer – Jason Pargin – is the main character/narrator and has a really great way of bringing a subtle fantasy of monsters and demons into the world of a semi-rational, cynical young bastard. He was troubled as a youngster, and this helps him touch upon actual issues that affect real people, making him a character that’s pretty easy to relate to. Even aside from him calling John a dumbass repeatedly, there is a large amount of angst he holds against humanity. As the story moves along, we learn more about why he was sent to special school to finish his senior year of high school, as he comes clean to Amy about committing the violent crime against jocks that were bullying him that landed him there.

The anti-bullying explosion of his was a very interesting point, I thought. It comes as he learns the truth about Amy, and why he feels bad about noticing her lack of a left hand when John never made an issue of it, and her depression, which actually makes David feel less optimistic about humanity than normal. He reciprocates by telling her of his story, and why he felt he had to do it. Bullies can only push so far before it all collapses against them. There was a moment the book, though funny and not truly very thought provoking, really got to me though. When he finished his spiel on stabbing a bully’s face, and was making a point of how no one should feel bad for those who prey upon kids – kids they feel are weaker in order to get an emotional high from beating them up or making them cry – when the victims fight back with an uncontrolled eruption of psychotic rage, he mentioned a bit about the Columbine School Shootings I had never considered: that the look on those jocks faces when the kids they had bullied had guns aimed for their chests must have been fucking priceless.

So yeah, if you are thinking of bullying someone, please don’t. Especially if the potential victim is a Cracked.com editor.

In all, very funny, very silly and though not a great plot line, carries a bit of a cult sensation to it that I can get behind. I’m happy the author is having it turned into a movie. I will watch it, and whether or not it is any good, I hope he made a serious amount of money from it all.